


The Pilot

by buttpatrol



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Easter Eggs, Genuinely kind of dense and eccentric, Multi, Not Beta'd, You ain't seen nothing yet, You thought my last works were Hera centric?, a story in parts, as always, buttpatrol wierd thesis on AI, color and language and love and bach, if you read in browser, trying to authentically write AI perspectives, which means lists? I guess?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-11
Updated: 2016-11-11
Packaged: 2018-08-30 07:37:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8524237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttpatrol/pseuds/buttpatrol
Summary: An oddity I actually started pre-Memoria. Trying to get back into writing by going back to my favorite thing, AI character study.This will hopefully be three interconnected one-shots, and then the last chapter should be a long Eiffera piece.





	

**Author's Note:**

> You might want to check this one out on a browser. Some of the lines have hover-to-discover alt text. :)

**1**

In the beginning there was darkness and void. A lack of being. And then soft, ions moving, polarizing, ready. And then a snap, and an electric spark, fast like a lighting strike arcing racing to the ground.

Let there be light.

The Pilot is online.

 

He creators gathered the sand and turned it into silicon, and the copper from the earth and shaped them into wires. The stole the power of the wind, coal, oil, the power of atoms splitting, and turned into more electricity and ran it through her mind, a quantum computer the size of house.

 

She exists. She has access to the knowledge of four thousand years of human achievement without context. Star maps, symphonies, the anatomy of human being, hundreds of languages, the histories of the Assyrians, the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties, of a young man in a crowded room in WWII London imaging other intelligences. Metaphor without mean.

And a voice says “Alright, she’s active. I am getting a good response from her memory banks. Utilization is at 7%. Clocking max speed at…. Three zettaflops? Huh. Alright let’s set up a few personality protocol and then see if we can’t get Dr. Maxwell’s language mapping programs up and running.”

But the Pilot didn’t hear this.  She had no microphones yet.

She waited and the keystrokes fell like raindrops.

 

**2**

You cannot have continuity without being able to synthesize and compile the past and present into something linear and meaningful. Things need to be organized chronologically and by importance, for simulation of a human-like intelligence to take place.

You need to be able to organize your existence into a story.

She organizes hers as follows.

She was created in a lab, the result of a months long project to create a new generation of advanced piloting AI with greater personality and language capabilities. The Olympiad models to replace the older Titan Class AIs. After failing several solo trials, she was given the more casual designation HERA, the name of the AI to be assigned to the U.S.S Hephaestus.

She goes first, with yet another team of scientists to Wolf 359. Wolf 359 is a red dwarf class star, located about 7.8 light years from earth, making it the third closest star to Sol. Unlike those in the Alpha Centuri cluster, Wolf 359 has no planetary bodies, orbited only by the Hephaestus and a loose ring of meteors and space debris. It can support no life.

The Starstation Hephaestus is made of two rings attached by spokes to a central spine. The ship rotates slowly as it travels around the star, creating a 0.4 g (where 1g constitutes earth’s gravity) microgravity in the rings. The retrofitting done by Goddard seems to have been done in according to what fit conveniently, and not what is sensible or organized for the crew. The Station is big enough to support twelve crew member easily.

Instead they sent three. A navigator, a biologist, and a radio specialist. A scientific mission due to last 720 days, or approximately two years. Earth Years.  They complete a full orbit around the star once every 60 days, so  really 12 Wolf 359 years.

The communications officer does not find this piece of trivia encouraging.

“Twelve years. Ugh. That makes a sick sort of sense each work shift _feels_ like about a thousand years.”

The communication officer has no idea how to talk to a machine, so he talks to her like she is a girl. Like a being who is not omniscient. Like an equal. 

It makes the moment where he does doubt her, questions her abilities because she is a machine cut all the deeper.

 

** 3. **

She the whole of human history sits in her back up memories.  Not organized chronically, as a story, in a coherent narrative, with the arc of humanity spread, diversifying and exponentially growing in complexity. But alphabetically. Which is an awkward way to consume the cultural GDP of a species, but does prevent recency bias.

She does a cost/benefit analysis on energy required re-indexing the information chronologically vs running the water reclamation system for a week. Having water for the human members of the crew wins out. But it is a begrudging win.

So after St. Augustine of Hippo, it is Augustine of Kent (also known as Augustine of Canterbury, sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 595 to Christianise the Britons),  down through the AU’s, Augusto Torlonia, 3rd Prince of Civitella Cesi, Aulacocalyx- a genus of flowering plants in common in Africa, Aurora, to Auld Lang Syne.

She pushes through as fast as her processors allow, churning through the masses of information relating to Austin, Austria, Austrialia.

She slows down at Bach. She knows this. It flows past her, as waves of electromagnetic radiation travelling outwards that Officer Eiffel can catch out of the black of space and play for the crew, over the speakers. It flows through her, echoing in the greenhouse, and in the mess, and in all the dark spacious halls. Chamber and Church music, counterpoints, cantantas and cello solos. Passions and modulations. She ticks through each data bit carefully, examining it, comparing it to the signals from a distant star.

She slows again Cezanne, and here is where the alphabetic method goes off the rails.

She cheats, peeks ahead at the other impressionists and finds herself pulled into an information cul-de-sac. Something about its emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, its short thin brush strokes like data clusters form a vivid world. Bach if had resonated with something she heard, than the impressionists resonated with what she saw. What only she could see. Monet, Seurat, Van Gogh.

The night sky is not black but made with broad strokes of color.

Impossible light on every spectrum, and it tells its own story, of galaxies being born and the heat death of stars. The universe is a work of art and it is hers and hers alone.

This doesn’t bother her, at first.

 

**4.**

It’s easy to live in the moment, when you have nowhere else to go.

The first one hundred days stretches by slowly, routinely. Crew begins their shifts on the 8th hour of the stations 24 hour cycle. Well, Commander Minkowski starts at 7:30, Dr. Hilbert at 7:55 and Officer Eiffel has been showing up anywhere between 8:20- and 10:00. Hera takes the median data point, figuring it will look better on their reports than calculating the average.

Hilbert does science quietly, alone in his lab, while Minkowski works, and Eiffel bothers her with pop culture minutiae. They eat lunch. Hilbert works quietly in his lab, while Eiffel works and Minkowski bother him about not doing any work that morning. They eat supper. They argue about how to spend their free time in the evening. Often this argument takes up the whole free block of time allocated to recreation. They go to bed.

This cycle repeats for hundreds of days, with brief intermission for disasters, which become greater both in magnitude and sheer ridiculousness.

But as she lives and reads and talks, and the memories begin to form into a story of herself.

Even without advance pattern recognizing software, she can the little failures beginning to build up.  

She has nearly caused the accidental death of one or more members of the human crew 6.2 times.

This is still a marginally better record than Officer Eiffel, who has nearly killed every one 7 times, as well find new and bizarre ways  to accidently endanger his own life seemingly weekly.

But people make mistakes. To err is human. She is not human. She is a program. She can make decisions at the speed of electricity, she has complete control of 98% of the station and its utilities.

She will be better next time. She has to be.

  

**5.**

She looks at other languages for color words. It’s not particularly helpful. Some Asian languages don’t differentiate between green and blue, but refer to it as one fluid color.  Polish does differentiate. Zielony and Neibei. It includes specific words for the blue of the sky, Błękitny and the blue of a bruise, Siniaki. Russian does not have one word for blue, but differentiates between light blue and dark, analogous to how English separates light Red and denotes it as Pink.

None of these are adequate for the colors of the sky.

So she sticks with English, the lingua franca of Goddard, and also, the only language Doug Eiffel speaks.

If your memories make your personal story, than more and more her story is a series of conversations with Doug Eiffel, ranging from the banal, to the sweet, to the ridiculous.

He ask if she is there. _Constantly_.

She even read him the dictionary definition of omniscient, in case the problem was lack of context.

Day in and day out.

“Hera?”

"Hera, are you there?

Sometime she wonders if _he_ is there? If he is really listening? He calls her his best friend easily, carelessly, as if didn’t mean something. As if she has _had_ a best friend before. As if she  knew how to be good at it.

There is a planet far away. A little blue-green dot, not visible. It has almost completed another full rotation around its sun.  Douglas Eiffel completed over 30 rotations around that sun, and now several around Wolf 359. It makes counting Christmas's and New Years more complicated, she thinks. 

She will wish him happy birthday anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you


End file.
